If internet bandwidth keeps getting wider and cheaper and people like us who want the absolute best quality we can afford and my generation which likes to buy tangible things passes the torch I thing all disk formats will become niche formats. Media-on-demand is the way of the future and I think most people will give up some quality for convenience.
As for Blu-ray specifically I don’t plan on owning that many title very soon. While the quality difference is extremely noticeable to me on the projector it’s less so on my HDTV but still better. Since there aren’t that many movies I watch over and over I don’t see needing to own that many titles when I can rent them from Netflix for under 1.50 a disk and have them here in a day or two at the most.
I can certainly see the advantage to “family” and “kids” titles being bundled but I don’t see the big selling point to the average user. Beyond that I don’t think it’s a great idea for Blu-ray’s marketing to promote a legacy format. I don’t recall seeing a lot of cassette/CD bundles or VHS/DVD bundles. Might make more sense for a HDDVD/DVD or SACD/CD bundle but not so much for Blu-ray which looses revenue the longer people buy DVD. OTOH it may certainly be an advantage to the studios releasing movies to bundle them.
Blu-ray’s total market and even market share will grow for some time but in the not so long run I imagine both DVD and Blu-ray will start loosing out to some Media-on-demand type format.
